Exclusive: Early Details on Microsoft’s ‘Kinect 2′

Despite some early skepticism, Microsoft’s Kinect add-on for the Xbox 360 has been largely successful. It comes as no surprise then that they are already hard at work on a follow up.

According to documents seen by Nukezilla, some of the goals Microsoft has for the next version of Kinect include a better RGB HD camera, dedicated processing, four player simultaneous tracking, better tolerance for less than perfect lighting conditions, better voice recognition and an improved “3D play space”, or in other words, better recognition of the kind of rooms that actually exist in peoples’ homes.

That last point is addressed multiple times in the documents, which at one point say, “Kinect sees your living room better than ever which means there’s no need to re-arrange furniture. Play seated or standing with your entire family.” Look for this to be one of the bigger selling points for the device.

The addition of four-player play is intriguing. It has the easy selling points of more is better, and ‘fun for the whole family’, or whatever line they end up going with. It will be interesting to see what games take advantage of that, beyond the prerequisite dance game of course.

It also appears that Kinect 2 will come in the form of two separate cameras, as seen in the above image. One of the documents does raise questions about whether the unit will ship with one camera or two. This could mean that some games would use one Kinect unit for basic functionality, or two for full four-player and better performance in general.

The Xbox Leak:

• Kinect 2: four players, two cameras
• Hardware back-compatibility dropped after 3 years, 10 year life-cycle
• Blue-ray drive built in, support for augmented reality glasses in the pipeline
• Announced Jan 2013, released holiday 2013 costing $200-$300

Disclaimer: The documents Nukezilla have seen come from a trusted source, and while we believe them to be accurate, and have done our best to verify them, we can not be absolutely certain. As such, consider this information more strong rumor than fact.